Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Media's Palinization: Why It Continues To Allow Itself To Be Co-Opted

I
have been reading books about and by Sarah Palin lately. Two reasons for
this: I am contemplating collaborating with a scholar on a book about
the Palin Birth Hoax and the mainstream media's cowardly retreat from
the likelihood that she faked a pregnancy in the run-up to the 2008
presidential election. And although I do not believe that there is an
ounce of genuineness in this woman, I continue to grapple with why she
remains such a heroine for so many conservatives although her star in
the Republican galaxy has faded, and remains such a powerfully
divisive force on the national scene.

There
are few, if any, better examples of a resume without a person than
Palin, whose sheer vapidity and penchant for making over-the-top
declarations; indeed, saying the wrong thing time and again,
nevertheless makes her such a magnet for people who are convinced, as
she is, that America has gone crazy. (We actually kind of agree here,
although for different reasons.)

Palin and many of her acolytes believe that the end time is
near. They believe that Barack Obama is demon spawn and that government
overreaches in everything from helping provide health care for those
who need it most to confronting the menace of global warming. They lie
awake at night obsessing over America's fast shrinking white majority.
And they have an utter lack of curiosity about anything and
everything that does not comport with their profoundly constipated world
view.

It
is this last aspect that perhaps most succinctly captures this
self-anointed mama grizzly: Like her followers, Palin doesn't want to
read or hear anything that conflicts with her beliefs. More than that,
people who disagree with her are not merely wrong, they are evil. She
could never acknowledge the existence of evolution, she has explained
with utter seriousness, because she once saw pictures showing human
footprints inside dinosaur tracks.

I
don't care if John McCain, who confessed that he opted for Palin as a
running mate in 2008 because she "made a strong impression," was put up
to it. His selection of Palin was incredible at the time based on what
little we knew about her, and is appalling in retrospect now that we
know so much about her. This includes a disdain for any semblance of
intellectual growth, her racism, and that she has had only one job in
her entire life that she didn't quit, which at least is in keeping with a
key tenet of the Tea Party that adores her and she loves back --
walking away from commitments, even if it means shutting down the
government and putting people out of work. Then there is Palin's
well-documented vengefulness. And some people still believe she would make a great president?

Palin remains fair game so long as she is afforded credibility by the mainstream media, let alone the posse at Fox News,
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. And indeed she was taken credibly in her short-lived run
for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. It wasn't that the
"lamestream" media, as Palin calls it, had failed to catch on that she was
a liar and a cipher based on the 2008 campaign experience and since then. The media
simply didn't care. The media didn't care to question, let alone investigate,
the birth hoax, among other glaring examples of her playing fast and loose with the facts, and as a result in effect vouched for her truthfulness.

When
rarely confronted as to why it was cowed by Palin, the media hid behind the specious notion that it
respected her family's privacy while at the same time she was using
Trig, a Down Syndrome child whom I believe probably was not her own, and
her other children as stage props. Or when the privacy excuse didn't
float, the media could smugly remind us that Palin would never be
president, sowhy bother to call her out?

Why bother to call her out when it was reported, in the wake of the
nearly successful assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabby
Giffords in January 2011, that Palin's political action committee had
targeted Giffords' congressional district at a website with gunsight crosshairs.
Palin not only went ballistic over the suggestion that she may have
contributed in some way to the dementia of Jared Lee Loughner, who did
succeed in killing six other people, including a federal judge and
nine-year-old bystander, she recorded her own video message after Fox
refused her airtime, accusing the media of a "blood libel" and releasing
the video on Vimeo the very day of a memorial service for Loughner's
victims.

Why bother to call her out when last month she endorsed waterboarding Muslim terrorists
as an introduction to their captivity. "Waterboarding is how we baptize
terrorists," she spouted in conflating torture with a Christian
sacrament.

"In
the end, this story is not about Palin," wrote Andrew Sullivan, who
virtually alone among bloggers with large audiences pursued
the birth hoax story and continues to call her out. "It's about the
collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system
that foisted this farce upon us without performing any minimal due
diligence."

1 comment:

You said it all in half of one sentence. Although Palin is a fine example of this, there are far too many more examples of the failure of the press or news out there. You could write a column a day on the subject but until mainstream news changes its stripes little is going to change. It's no longer news "It's just business".

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.